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Coming out from under

It never gets old, coming back out into the world after treatment, seeing my life with fresh (albeit twitchy and tired) eyes. I descend from the cave of the upstairs bedroom, delighted again to see the decor of our still relatively new home. I curl up on the couch in the TV room, still rather too exhausted to do much more than hang out, but I get to see new pictures and pillows and faces besides my own. I’m excited to hang with my people again, mere days before I was glumly and crankily stuck inside my little chemo shell. Best yet is when I get to go out even farther, hop in the car and drive around town, seeing Petaluma and occasionally catching glimpses of friends out on their own (sadly none today). I had a good day out and about, running errands with Tess and my mom, although I went a little longer than I should have and spent the last couple hours resting. But I’m awfully glad to be on this side of things, coming back out from the chemo haze and spending the next 11 days in the real world with people doing things.

It’s a very solitary pursuit, the chemo convalescence, and this one was harder. Each time I get blood work done the day before to both measure the chemo cocktail I’ll get the next day and to monitor what’s going on with my system under the chemo duress. I haven’t paid much attention to what they look at exactly, as everything has looked so “as expected” that it’s not newsworthy enough. Until now. This time my blood levels were borderline, had they dropped even a couple points I would not have gotten chemo that day. The trouble is that we may need to expect continued dropping, which could mean that the next chemo gets postponed a week. And since it’s my last one, I will be quite disappointed.

I am one chemo treatment away from being done. Which also means I get to start freaking out about surgery, scheduled 5 weeks after on December 2. I am getting a bilateral mastectomy with DIEP flap reconstruction. I am not going to go into details about it now, because I have already started freaking out about it and if I get too into it I start to get the willies. Suffice to say: I get a bonus tummy tuck! But holy cow am I going to get stitched up. It’s going to be a challenging recovery, so losing a preparation week to a postposed chemo may make my recovery a little harder so here’s hoping everything goes according to schedule. Gulp.